


In which Ophelia is wronged by her author and I can't stop writing these absurd Romantics

by mercuryhatter



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-17
Updated: 2013-04-17
Packaged: 2017-12-08 17:40:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,103
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/764152
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mercuryhatter/pseuds/mercuryhatter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jehan gets upset while translating Shakespeare in the middle of the night. Bahorel doesn't mind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In which Ophelia is wronged by her author and I can't stop writing these absurd Romantics

“René!”

Bahorel would have startled at this positively plaintive wail carrying his given name at it’s-far-too-late-Jehan-how-did-you-even-get-over-here o’clock… would have, if not for the fact that this circumstance that seems so unusual to the casual observer is in fact a bi-weekly occurrence.

“Renééééééééé…”

Bahorel heaves a sigh that’s really only a fraction as exasperated as it seems, wraps his blanket around his shoulders, and shuffles to the window.

“If this makes me Juliet…” he starts in a warning tone, only to be cut off by another wail, this time wordless.

“Do not speak to me of Juliet!” Jehan cries, flinging himself down in a heap upon the sidewalk, a move that was probably intended to be dramatic, but in practice mostly just achieves petulance. “I am very angry with Monsieur Shakespeare just now!”

“Which explains why you are flailing around in the middle of the streat wearing a waistcoat rather than that doublet you’ve worn for the past week,” Bahorel observes. “What has that dreadful Bard done to you this time? No, wait, don’t tell me yet, I’ll be down in a moment to let you in.” Bahorel retreats from the window, pulling on a pair of pants under his nightshirt and a coat over the whole thing, before traversing the stairs to let Jehan in before his racket wakes the entire building. 

(That had happened once. Jehan had woken the irate schoolteacher on the first floor, who’d leaned out of his door to fling an empty bottle at the poet; Jehan, being more inclined to philosophizing than violence at that moment, had stood by, orating to the man’s bottle, while Bahorel had leaned over to shove the man back into his room before he threw anything else. Unfortunately, a shove from Bahorel had a tendency to come off as a challenge, and the two ended up in a scuffle that woke the entire rest of the building once Jehan had joined in. The schoolteacher moved out the next day.) 

Jehan falls on Bahorel as soon as the latter opens the door, aiming for his neck, but the height difference between the two men means he lands more around the vicinity of Bahorel’s waist. Bahorel rolls his eyes, simply swinging the poet up and carrying him into the flat, depositing him onto the couch so that he may languish to his heart’s delight. He immediately takes advantage of this, throwing himself back across the couch with his head tossed back over the arm and the back of his hand laid across his eyes. Bahorel seats himself backwards on the chair he’s dragged over from the desk, rests his chin on his forearms, and waits, grinning.

Jehan takes a deep breath and speaks.

“I finished the translation of Hamlet.” 

“Do you always translate English literature while drinking all the absinthe on the continent?” He does smell very strongly of absinthe, which, along with his inability to remain quite upright, is Bahorel’s only real clue to his state of intoxication, as Bahorel could quite easily picture Jehan doing all these things sober. 

Jehan lifts his hand from his eyes so that he can glare briefly at Bahorel, then replaces it.

“Usually. I find it helps me to come up with French metaphors closer to the original English.” Bahorel inclines his head as if to concede this point, and Jehan continues. “ _Anyway_. The reason for my distress.” He takes a deep breath, leading Bahorel to expect a long speech, but the only words that left Jehan’s mouth were:

“Everyone  _dies_!” And he gives himself over to a fit of tears, turning over to hide his face in the arm of the couch.

Bahorel waits patiently for Jehan to finish. He’d been engaged in the project for the past month— translating the most popular of Shakespeare’s plays into French, because Feuilly’s birthday was coming up and Jehan thought he needed something less serious to read. He had pestered Grantaire into doing a couple of illustrations, and had Courfeyrac in charge of the binding— well, Courfeyrac had put himself in charge of the binding, after Jehan mentioned absently that he thought green and orange might make a good color scheme. It was something Jehan had been hardly able to contain his excitement over, especially around Feuilly himself (and if Feuilly didn’t know what was going on by now Bahorel was seriously doubting his deductive skills) but then Jehan had started on the tragedies. The night of the thrown bottle and the evicted schoolteacher, he’d just finished Macbeth. A week before that, he’d shown up at Bahorel’s building in torrents of tears speaking incoherently about Romeo and Juliet.

After that, Bahorel had ceased to worry too much when the poet used his couch as a handkerchief. 

He waits for a lull in the tears to interject, as gently as possible even though he’s really very tempted to giggle. It’s not that he doesn’t sympathize with Jehan, but it is  _very_  late at night and it’s not as if Jehan doesn’t know what a tragic play is supposed to entail. 

“Jehan, it’s a tragedy. That’s the point. You know this.”

Jehan sniffles pitifully and nods, shifting to sit upright.

“Yeees, but was it really necessary for  _Ophelia_  to die? I know, I knew ahead of time that she would, but I couldn’t help but harbor a secret hope that she would be the one to live and then possibly become queen of Denmark. Just as a for-instance,” he adds, shrugging at Bahorel’s skeptical eyebrow quirk. “And then I got distracted and started writing out an alternate ending where that does happen before I got back on task… I did finish it, mind you, I’ll bring the pages to Courfeyrac tomorrow, but…” He sniffles again and hides his face in his up-drawn knees, muttering something that sounds like  _Opheliaaa_  into his trousers. 

Bahorel shifts over to the couch and pats Jehan’s head, undoing the tangled ponytail at the back and sliding his fingers through it until the frizzy curls spring back up again under his hands. Somewhere between the soothing motion of fingers in his hair, the influence of the absinthe, and the effects of having been up for eighteen straight hours, Jehan falls asleep, tipping over sideways onto the couch. Bahorel grins and pats his head, curls now fluffed up in a halo because you weren’t really supposed to brush out curls like that, but neither Bahorel nor the sleeping Jehan really care. He drops an extra blanket over the couch and goes back to his room to sleep, anticipating a headachey but happy Jehan in his rooms the next morning. 


End file.
